The best phone you can buy for under $500

Budget phones have gotten really good over the last few years. Meanwhile, the price of flagship devices has stayed about the same, with some phones approaching or passing the $1,000 mark. Is it worth it to pay a premium for a slightly better experience? Senior tech reporter Antonio Villas-Boas breaks down what makes the Moto G6 the best budget phone you can buy. Following is a transcript of the video.

Antonio Villas-Boas: So, I'm a tech reviewer, as you can imagine I have access to a lot of cool gadgets, the latest and best smartphones. So I tend to use those, you know, really high-end smartphones. Whenever a $250 smartphone comes across my desk, like the Moto G6, I'm interested, you know, I want to see how far a less expensive smartphone could take me. I honestly can't say that I was noticing that this was a $250 smartphone. I was just using my apps, watching my videos, doing my things, just on this $250 smartphone.

Another great thing about this phone is its design. This is a glass back smartphone. That's something you usually find on the high-end stuff. You know, you're not gonna get some of the stuff like wireless charging. Honestly, overall it looks like a really nice phone. Fine, you know, it's got the bezels. Right? It's got the top and bottom bezels that are kind of large, by today's standards. That never really bothered me when I was using it.

It has a fingerprint sensor on the front, which I like. It has the headphone jack. It has a dual lens camera on the back. Then we gotta talk about the screen, this a 1080p resolution screen, it's 5.7 inches, as well. I never once thought that, hmm, I wish I was watching this YouTube video or using this app on a Galaxy S9.

The apps were running just fine, just quickly opening pretty quickly, too. It wasn't quite as snappy as the super-premium smartphones but I never felt frustrated by, you know, any sort of slowness or anything like that. And, in fact, I wouldn't say it's slow at all, it's pretty quick.

Photos it takes are pretty good. You know, not bad as long as you're in a well-lit situation, you know, the photo will take pretty quickly and it looks okay, you'll be fine with it. The problem though is when it turns to low light. You gotta sort of compose a shot, stand really still, make sure you're not shaking the phone at all. Your subject has to be really still and not moving so there's no blurry effect in the shot. It's not a good low light camera. That's kind of a thing that you're paying for in the high-end super premium smartphones out there.

Honestly, there's so few trade-offs, I guess I have to start nitpicking a little bit. Because this runs sort of a slower processor than you'd usually find, it might not last as long as, you know, sort of an iPhone or Galaxy S9 or those phones that use the latest chips and all that. So far, this has been totally fine. I keep looking at it cause it just amazes me how quickly this thing just opens apps just without any real problem at all.

So something else I really like about the Moto G6 is that it runs sort-of a near stock Android. And that means there's no extra stuff on top of Android. Like you find in some other smartphones out there. And that's the reason why the Moto G6 can run so well on, you know, kind of a mid-range processor, there's not much bloatware. There's a couple Moto apps here and there, they're not offensive at all.

This phone is for everyone. If you don't really care so much about the camera, if you're just fine with whatever shot you take, this phone is, I would say everyone should buy it to be honest. But if you want it all, if you want absolutely everything and you don't wanna pay 800 bucks, if you can spend more on a smartphone and go up to the $530 region, I would check out the OnePlus 6. Otherwise, 250 will get you a heck of a lot, apparently. And there you go.